Raw Story

In a new "history" cartoon aimed at children, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, now a Fox News personality, spins an animated, less-than-nuanced retelling of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., with a distinctly pro-Bush, pro-torture spin.

In his "Learn Our History," the former Republican presidential candidate puts forward a version of 9/11 that depicts America "coming together" in the wake of the attacks and rallying behind their leader's plan to "take down al Qaeda."

A Time Magazine 'Person of the Year' argues WikiLeaks serves the public good

A member of a group of former intelligence professionals that has rallied behind WikiLeaks suggested in a recent interview with Raw Story that the world would be a different and better place had the online secrets outlet come into existence years sooner.

“If there had been a mechanism like Wikileaks, 9/11 could have been prevented,” Coleen Rowley, a former special agent/legal counsel at the FBI's Minneapolis division, told Raw Story in an exclusive interview.

"Shoppers at Walmart will soon have something other than glossy magazines and chewing gum to look at when in the checkout line: A "video message" from the Department of Homeland Security asking them to look out for "suspicious" activity and report it immediately."

A new television ad campaign featuring the family members of 9/11 victims has succeeded in garnering what 9/11 activists have lacked for years: serious treatment in the mainstream media.

Granted, that media was Fox News host Geraldo Rivera, who in a former iteration ran a Jerry Springer-like daytime talk show. That and, the last time Rupert Murdoch's conservative-tilted television channel seriously talked about issues pertaining to 9/11, they were calling for a public official's resignation over a signature on one of the "9/11 truth" petitions.

Still, at the end of his serious-yet-brief treatment of questions surrounding the collapse of World Trade Center 7 (WTC 7, pictured), Rivera admitted that the activists had made him "much more open minded" about questions surrounding 9/11.

The nine-year-old body of 9/11 conspiracy theories includes many improbable (and sometimes contradictory) claims, everything from remote-controlled planes flying into the World Trade Center, to a missile hitting the Pentagon, to mass kidnappings of air passengers.

But a group of more than 1,200 architects and engineers is building what it hopes is a scientifically sound argument about one 9/11 claim: That the World Trade Center buildings were destroyed not by fires caused by the airplane collisions, but by a controlled demolition.
At a press conference in Washington DC, Thursday, the group Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth offered evidence "that all three WTC skyscrapers on September 11, 2001, in NYC were destroyed by explosive controlled demolition."

Senior Bush administration officials sternly cautioned the 9/11 Commission against probing too deeply into the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, according to a document recently obtained by the ACLU.

The notification came in a letter dated January 6, 2004, addressed by Attorney General John Ashcroft, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and CIA Director George J. Tenet. The ACLU described it as a fax sent by David Addington, then-counsel to former vice president Dick Cheney.

In the message, the officials denied the bipartisan commission's request to question terrorist detainees, informing its two senior-most members that doing so would "cross" a "line" and obstruct the administration's ability to protect the nation.

Former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura has seen some stuff that will blow your mind.

Or, at least that's the tagline to "Conspiracy Theory," his new show on US cable station TruTV. In episode two, the one-time wrestler and movie star goes after one of America's greatest sacred cows: the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

It is, as far as this reporter can tell, the first time a syndicated program on U.S. cable has given a serious look at arguments made by members of the 9/11 truth movement.

A comment on Van Jones and the 9/11 Truth 'movement'The Webster Retort
Sunday, September 6, 2009

Following several days of relentless assault by the right-wing media, Obama's Green Jobs "czar" has called it quits. After right-wing blogs uncovered his signature on a 9/11 Truth statement, Fox News went into overdrive, and boy, did it ever get ugly.

According to Jane Mayer, author of The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals, two top lawyers in the Justice Department who attempted to push back against the authorization of torture by Vice President Cheney's staff became so paranoid that they worried they were being wiretapped and even feared they might be in physical danger.

Mayer told the hosts of MSNBC's Morning Joe that Cheney's staff took advantage of 9/11 to enhance presidential power and that -- in the words of Republican lawyer and former 9/11 Commission director Philip Zelikow -- "fear and anxiety were exploited by fools and zealots."

Mayer added, however, that there were also opponents of torture and other extreme powers within the administration. "Almost from the start after 9/11," she stated, "lawyers in the administration have said, 'That's not the American way, we can't do that, it's criminal, it may be a war crime.'"

Michael Reagan, radio talk show host and son of late president Ronald Reagan, could be investigated by the FBI after he called for the execution of Mark Dice, anti-war activist and founder of media watchdog group The Resistance, on the air.

On the June 10th edition of his nationally syndicated Radio America show, Reagan called Dice and others in the “9/11 Truth” movement “traitors” after learning that they were sending letters, declassified documents and DVDs to troops in Iraq that they say point to government involvement in the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001.

The effort is part of The Resistance’s “Operation Inform the Soldiers.”

“I don’t want the soldiers who are risking their lives in Iraq to be used as pawns in the creation of the New World Order,” Dice said in a recent press release. “I personally know U.S. Marines who believe 9/11 was an inside job, and they tell me that many Marines suspect that this is the case but are afraid to speak up out of fear of punishment.”

After being broadly denounced as "crazy people" by HBO's sharp-tongued Bill Maher, some members of the so-called 9/11 Truth movement -- a group convinced that US government accounts of the Sept. 11 tragedies do not fully explain the events of that day -- decided to give Maher a taste of his own caustic medicine.

In a new video making its rounds on the internet, one band of miffed Los Angeles-based "Truthers" borrows the graphics, theme music and trademark bite of Maher's popular "New Rules" segment to push back at the comedian's charges that conspiracy theorists are lunatics. "Crazy people are defined by acting crazy," activist Stewart Howe says in the clip, sitting alongside a Maher-esque video window depicting Fox News host Bill O'Reilly in a straight jacket. "9/11 Truthers," he continues, "are defined by a patriotic quest for the truth."